AI used by police cannot tell Black people apart and other reasons Canada’s AI laws need urgent attention
AI used by police cannot tell Black people apart and other reasons Canada’s AI laws need urgent attention
Two new laws with major implications for how AI is used in society are being considered in Canada. Both lack protections for the public from the harms of AI, including racial profiling by police.
In Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and other policing agencies, including the Toronto Police Service and the Ontario Provincial Police, have already been called out by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada for using the Clearview AI technology to conduct mass surveillance.
Clearview AI has a database of over three billion images that were collected without consent by scraping the internet. Clearview AI matches faces from the database against other footage. This violates Canadian privacy laws. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has critiqued RCMP use of this technology and the Toronto Police Services suspended use of that product.
AI facial recognition systems cannot tell most people of colour apart. According to one study, the error rate is the highest for Black women, at 35 per cent.
For the most part the hype around "AI" is just annoying, but here it's actually dangerous. I don't expect most police officers would know or care that this is not a precise and accurate technology, if it gives them a quick and easy way to find and arrest suspects.
It does the same thing they do already, it just gives them plausible deniability.
Yep just passes the blame further down the line on and obscures the being acting and their racial biases.
I'm an AI enthusiast, but id be the first to say that whoever greenlights a system with such obvious bias issues for something so important should be sacked. Although, before AI, cops just use bullshit mindreading tactics that basically boil down to "harass anyone who doesn't act within your cultural and neurotypical norms" while encouraging them to influence their own perceptions with any personal or local biases. I.E. Cops are borked and need reshaping.
It’ll get better.